Monthly Archives: October 2016

Influencers –Where to Find Them and What to Do When You Have Influencer marketing has grown in popularity over the last several years. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute recently named it one of the top content marketing trends for 2017. What is it, and where did it come from?

You can think of it as the offspring of social media – and what in simpler days we called word-of-mouth. But today it’s more strategic and more viable in terms of reaching influential people you might not have had access to before. In our field, there are of course the people who are industry influencers – book buyers, key librarians and educators, and others who are opinion-makers about authors and books. They can be found speaking at conferences, attending publisher events, and on the award committees at the national and regional level. They’re also often reviewers, bloggers, and active on social media about education, publishing, and children’s and young adult literature.

But what if you want to reach key influencers outside the field? You should think about doing this because books for young people are also topical – and each topic has influencers of its own. Whatever the topic of your book, look at ways you can reach the people whose voices carry weight in those fields. Betters still, find influencers tied to both that topic and education or children. It’s even more important if many of your books focus on a particular genre or topic area. The value of cultivating these people is that they can introduce you to a broader audience – and commend you to others who respect their opinion.

The simplest place to start is Google Search. Type in related keywords and phrases and see who has written on the topic, what organizations relate to that, and which names you see again and again. You can also check Twitter to see who’s tweeting about your topic and how many followers they have. To come at it from the top down, you can use AllTop to find the most influential bloggers and reporters on a given topic. They aggregate thousands of sources and update hourly to provide links to the most trafficked sites covering hundreds of topics from adoption to zoology. Other sites, like Social Mention, BuzzSumo and the newer EpicBeat will curate social media to tell you which content has gotten the most shares, likes and feedback – and can tell you who are the key influencers in that topic area.

Once you identify people, you have to have a meaningful way to engage. Simple ways to start can be to comment on their posts and share their content. But lots of people are doing that, so it’s hard to stand out. But if you create online content of your own via a blog or other platform, you can try to interest them more directly. One way would be to quote them and link to their material and then let them know via Twitter that you’ve done so. Taking that a step further you can crowd source an article and ask for quotes from a number of people whose opinions you value and who you’d like to connect with, and then share the story back with them when you’re done. As you begin to develop a relationship, you can invite people to provide a guest blog for your site, do an interview with you for a feature, and perhaps later, gain an endorsement quote for your new book.

The results will be that you’ll broaden your base of connections and benefit from associating with people you admire. Your research and time spent following social conversations will also make you better versed in what’s trending on topics you care about. That’s something you can bring back to conversations you have at conferences, publisher events and with literary luminaries who will value your expertise and may also be interested to connect to other influencers you know.